by Way Woo
Even my head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds or something.
“You okay?”
Jake gave opening his eyes the good old college try to see who said that, and his weary vision could make out a man in a brown cloak giving him a piggyback ride.
“I’ll live,” Jake slurred out. “Backlash from an item. Will be fine once I get some sleep.”
“All right,” the man carrying him said as they made their way back to town.
When Thirst for Power said it had side effects, they really meant it, Jake thought. Holy crap, this drink really kicks back!
With nothing left to do and while at the mercy of his fellow adventurer, Jake spent his time browsing the Hero Shop – he couldn’t help it. Even in his state, he couldn’t help but browse, especially since a lot of the items were newly added.
Okay, four purchases for the day.
I think I may have overdone it a little, Jake sheepishly thought. It’s just like that last time when I had a credit card and smoked my bank account’s bottom line so bad, I had to stop cold turkey for six months.
I was shivering like a nervous wreck during that time, either the companies or the law firms were going to go after me for it.
He remembered going to online stores, filling up baskets with orders, then smacking himself in the face to keep from getting himself deeper in debt.
I’m doing this too quickly.
I need to slow down.
Otherwise it’s going to be me punching myself in the face and living in fear of collection agencies and credit card companies all over again.
Still, though…
The Black Label Hero Shop…
So freaking pretty…
“Dude, you’ve been speaking aloud ever since I started carrying you.”
“I did?” Jake asked, raising his head a bit before it sank back down. “Sorry. Thinking out loud. Can’t think when I’m tired.”
“I know,” the man carrying him said before chuckling.
Jake wisely kept quiet from that point onward.
***
In Jake’s eyes, he was in a brave new world: a premium line with items of better quality and price than what is normally available.
Commonly referred to as the ‘black label’, the Hero Shop was no exception to this.
It was unexpected for Jake, but after he had taken the charge for the Werecrocodile fight, it was what you’d call an extremely pleasant surprise.
As soon as the alert showed him that the Black Label Hero Shop was finally stocked with items, he gathered himself, took a deep breath, and made his first step into the premium line of the Hero Shop.
All coherent thought of his stopped as soon as he opened up the catalog.
So beautiful.
They should have sent a poet.
Everything the Hero Shop had and more was given an even better visual treatment.
The pictures of each item were professionally taken and the details of each item were beautifully worded – truly earning the right to call itself the “black label”.
It also went without saying that the prices for each item could be optimistically described as “exorbitant”.
[Archdemon’s Wrath: 10000 points
Skill
Description: This is a skill that allows one to focus energy at one point, and then attack. Any physical or magical attack used in conjunction with this skill will have its attack power raised by a very large degree, since all your energy is gathered in one point. While this skill is optimized for fighting single units, further training in this skill can unlock supplemental uses of this skill for area-of-effect attacks. When raised to its highest rank, this skill allows you to bypass the defense rating of any target.]
Whoa. Ten thousand points.
I could spend my entire Werecrocodile bounty on this skill alone.
But that would be impractical.
As he continued to browse, Jake came up with one conclusion.
Everything here is currently too expensive.
[Monster Gourmet: 4000 points
Skill
Description: Allez cuisine! Ever wanted to take a bite out of those annoying monsters? Here’s your chance. You will need an upgraded Cooking Set for this skill to activate, though.]
Okay, THIS is weird, Jake said as he saw the skill that allowed you to take edible parts from monsters and cook them. Turning monsters into food items is good if you want to survive... but there’s so many good things to buy! I’ll go back to this after browsing further.
He turned to the food section.
[Spicy Ramen: 500 points
Item
Description: A ramen spiced with habaneros, ghost chili, and the tears of countless brave men and women who thought they could make it through this without going to the nearest glass of milk. So spicy you will breath fire – literally!]
[Pepperoni Pizza: 1200 points
Item
Description: This Italian invention consisting of a wheat-based flatbread, marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese and pepperoni slices, all delicately seasoned and oven baked to perfection is too good not to share with others.]
As Jake browsed the list of items for sale, Jake realized that he no longer had to worry about the food problem in Nohas – there was a veritable smorgasbord of delicacies on sale here, and all Jake needed was the points to afford them!
He was already thinking about what to buy rather than whether if he should.
Not buying because of the expense? Ridiculous, Jake thought. The greater the expense in getting the item, the greater the pleasure you get when it’s finally in your hands. That’s the high someone like me chases all the time.
And here, there is no such thing as credit limits. Fight monsters, acquire currency, buy stuff.
That is all.
But… I already have MP due to my purchases. The question is, what should I use it on?
He’d just finished making a list of things he wanted to buy once he was well enough to open packages, and was now looking through the list of skills that used mana points – MP.
It IS kind of counter-intuitive for the Hero Shop to do this kind of thing, kind of like putting the cart before the horse, or buying the coffee beans before buying the coffee grinder and coffee maker… oh wait, that was me.
He was just about to look at the next page of skills when a notification flashed before his eyes.
[The Black Label Hero Shop’s inaugural event will begin in a few minutes!]
Despite his exhaustion, Jake Smithson’s eyes were twinkling in anticipation of what items may come for him to buy.
***
The sun set on Nohas, the skies turning a bloody red before going down to black.
A fitting way of ending the day, given that the various towns in Nohas were scenes of death and devastation.
Cries of pain and sobs littered the landscape, as the outskirts of their towns were littered with the dead and the dying.
In a land area approximating the United States, there were around twenty tutorial towns there, so it was more or less the same throughout Nohas… and the adventurers from all of them were ravaged by the Werecrocodile appearing.
It was less a fight and more a massacre.
But with more than three-quarters of their town’s adventurers already slain and the rest wounded and exhausted, they braced for their end…
…only for the Werecrocodile to turn its back and leave, taking its goblin escorts with it.
***
The confusion of the surviving adventurers quickly gave way to relief at their survival, most of them collapsing as the tension of the day’s battle left them, and the joy at being able to live another day filled them.
However, their relief would not last long.
The voice from the clouds spoke again.
[The Werecrocodile has lost interest in battle due to your weakness and has decided to withdraw to return later. Take this moment to recover and train yourselves!]
“I lived!”
>
“I'm alive!”
Many similar shouts of relief were made in the towns in Nohas, but the more experienced adventurers weren’t quite as relieved.
“It's not the time to celebrate our survival,” one of them said. “We have to get stronger, quicker. We don’t know when that thing will come again… time is a luxury we cannot afford. “
The joy the surviving adventurers felt was quickly dispersed by the reality that the Werecrocodile would return, and would fight for keeps this time.
“How do you kill such a thing?” was a question quite a lot of the survivors asked, recalling the Werecrocodile and falling into despair.
They couldn’t imagine that there would be a new adventurer or group of adventurers that could successfully defeat the monster.
They were not the only ones to make such an assumption, and nobody knew at this point that someone would hunt a Werecrocodile.
Of course, in Brino, the same voice was heard.
Nobody paid it any heed, except for a certain exhausted man who did his best to raise up his arm and give the voice in the sky a well-deserved one-finger salute.
Take your Werecrocodile and shove it, Jake thought. That thing’s not coming back here.
The man carrying him laughed at the gesture.
***
Elsewhere, a certain office was in absolute chaos.
“KELDERIAN!” a panicked voice shouted. “We need you down here, we have a problem!”
A man in a suit poked his head out from a side office door.
“Yes, Princess?” he replied.
“Unauthorized access at World 57-B, Nohas. We think it’s a security breach.”
Kelderian furrowed his eyebrows.
“FUCK ME RUNNING! I think we have a hacker!”
Kelderian’s eyebrows went way up his forehead, and he kicked the door of his office open and made his way to the incident office.
Someone shoved a ream of paper with various printouts on them onto his arms as soon as he entered.
“Does this look like the work of an average adventurer to you?” the office lady asked. “Read it.”
Five minutes in, and Keldarian was already breaking out in a cold sweat.
“That’s not possible – we put up the latest security systems when we started this!” he exclaimed. “And what’s this?”
“You tell me, Keldarian,” the woman replied. “You’re the one who headed the team responsible for designing the entry-level content in this damned thing!”
Work stopped as soon as everyone turned to hear the woman raise her voice.
Keldarian let out a pained breath.
“Okay, let me run it by you again, because you weren’t here when we were in closed Alpha and closed Beta stages,” he explained. “Our research team determined that bringing in a monster that cannot be defeated within the second encounter is a sure fire way to weed out those who don’t belong here. Like, if you can’t beat the Werecrocodile, then use it as a way to get stronger, so that when it returns, you can fight it more evenly. You understand?”
The woman nodded, and then pointed to the screen.
“Nohas Hero Shop Open Beta Accessed.”
Keldarian fell into a dead faint as soon as he saw the screen.
***
As soon as Keldarian recovered from his fainting spell, he checked to see where he was, and then his watch.
Ten minutes out cold. Rec room. Not good.
He quickly stood up and went back to the main office space from the recreation room.
“Okay, can anyone here explain how the hell someone could bypass the entire first ten percent of our content and actually defeat a Werecrocodile?”
Another female office lady walked up to him.
“This wasn't supposed to happen,” Keldarian told her absentmindedly while thumbing through the combat logs.
“Well you know how the saying goes, ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst’,” his assistant replied.
“This wasn't in the plan--!” Keldarian thundered out, waving the logs at her.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail,” the longsuffering assistant said in rote monotone.
Keldarian sighed. “It's times like these that made me wish there were exceptions.”
“But there IS an exception, sir,” the assistant said. “Check here."
Keldarian’s eyes went wide as he saw the character profile.
***
Though the adventurers of Brino were a bit shocked at the Werecrocodile’s defeat, another group was perhaps even more disturbed at the monster’s unplanned death: the back office of the Hero Shop’s Nohas branch.
The Hero Shop carries out business in numerous dimensions, with different names corresponding to its appropriate role in whatever dimension it operates in.
Therefore, the branch in Nohas branch uses the name ‘Hero Shop’.
Right now, the Nohas branch of the Hero Shop was in deep trouble.
“Check the logs, the access wasn’t unauthorized.”
“NOT UNAUTHORIZED? This guy has had beta access ever since he showed up here! How is THAT not unauthorized?!”
And all of this was due to someone getting to sample the store’s catalog even before its formal opening.
The character’s name: Jake Smithson – character class, Bargain Hunter.
“Okay,” Keldarian said, taking deep breaths as he began to do his job: unraveling the mystery of how this guy got so good, so quickly. “Do we have a list of open beta access codes that have been given away?”
Keldarian’s assistant answered.
“No, none of our open beta access codes to the Hero Shop have been distributed.”
“Then we need to look deeper. This guy is an anomaly: someone like him who has been around Nohas for so short a time buying that many products in a store he shouldn’t have had access too yet?”
The concept of adventurers exists in many dimensions. Monsters, too. And yes, these monsters have a bad habit of attacking settlements regardless of dimension.
And across these dimensions, if you kill a monster, you get points – and this is why the Hero Shop was accessible to many different dimensions, it was the universality of the concept.
***
“How can someone collect that many points that quickly?” one of the analysts asked, while looking over the logs. “It doesn't make sense at all.”
“Anybody with the open beta access code would need to do specific missions to gain points as reward. For hunting monsters, they get experience, NOT points. No wonder the first team reading the logs thought this guy was a hacker of some kind.”
“Look at his combat info, though,” another analyst said. “He doesn’t gain experience. At all. He should be at level 3 with 8 goblins killed, level 7 with 25 orcs killed, and level 12 with that stunt of his. But he’s stuck at level 1.”
“Wait a minute, bring up the EXP table,” a third analyst said. “There’s your anomaly right there. This guy doesn’t gain experience. He gets POINTS per monster killed.”
“So he really is hacking!” the first analyst said. “He’d have to be – did you check his purchasing history?”
“These missions aren’t easy,” the third analyst said. “You need to gain levels to be strong enough to complete them. This guy’s breaking the rules and the game balance itself. If this keeps up, we’re going to be hauled before this dimension’s Bureau for Better Business!"
“We could avoid a lot of the backlash,” Keldarian’s assistant said. “Since we’ve just finished implementing the early and mid-game content and researching the market, we haven’t launched a formal opening of the Hero Shop on Nohas yet.”
“Sounds good. So are we going to tell them it’s a test server or a soft opening?”
“We’ll choose the option that makes the most sense.”
“If you see how much this guy has been purchasing, a soft opening is a better explanation… even if we’re running a test server.”
“Even if
the balance of power on this place in Nohas has already gone to shit?”
“Language!” Keldarian shouted from within his office. “I heard that! And yes, that’s the best we can tell the Bureau out of a bad lot of alternatives.”
He wanted to continue his explanation, but in a corner of the back office, someone screamed.
“BLACK LABEL SECTION OPENED!”
In the Nohas back office of the Hero Shop… pandemonium ensued.
***
“Give me those logs!” Keldarian shouted as he shoved his way past coworkers towards where the hapless employee who made the announcement sat. “Move aside, let me through!”
He made it in a few steps.
“Show me.”
The employee pointed to the screen.
“Okay, how is this possible?!” he yelled out in consternation. “First, we have what the server recognizes as authorized access by someone without an open beta store access code, then someone who gains no freaking EXP at all, and now this? How the hell is the Black Label section open already within two days of our Nohas test server going online?”
Keldarian’s assistant caught up to him with her own copy of the logs.
“This might answer your questions, sir.”
She pointed towards a few lines.
“World 57-B, Nohas, Beginner Area 11, Brino… Werecrocodile… DEFEATED?”
Keldarian managed to save his consciousness.
However, he still looked silly for a moment, with his jaw hanging loose.
It took him a good minute to process everything that happened.
They opened the test server for the Hero Shop on Nohas.
Someone got in and was buying stuff like mad within 36 hours of opening.
Access to the Black Label was gained by a player within 48 hours of opening.
But for that to happen, the Werecrocodile needed to be defeated on the server.
Nobody in Nohas should be able to be defeat the Werecrocodile at that point, based on their extensive closed alpha and open beta tests before launching the Hero Shop here.
“How… what… can someone actually kill a Werecrocodile at this point?” Keldarian asked, looking like heaven and earth had collapsed on him.
“Check the purchase logs,” the assistant said, taking charge while her boss was still in the throes of an anxiety attack.
“Got it. Purchase logs online. I see several purchases of Hidden Stat books,” the analyst replied.
